It's too big, this place.
She stands in the doorway, her back against the wooden frame, her eyes fixed on her stocking feet, slipped half out of her heels. Tonight is the same as the night before, and the night before that: she leaves work and comes here, to this too-big loft that might as well be a palace, and stands in the doorway looking at the floor. She is by no means an uncertain woman - but coming here, like this, makes her unfailingly... well, uncertain.
It isn't that she's nervous, she thinks. She has been here before, and knows well enough where to find things or how to act (although the idea that she would act any differently here is a laughable one, in her mind). It's that, when she swings open the door to the next room, she doesn't know what to say.
It's too big, this house. It's big, and empty. She's been staying here alone, in his loft, for two weeks now. And when she opens the door into the next room and steps into silence, she always hesitates, always wonders what she will say when he is back and this ends.
Or when it begins, she thinks, because she isn't stupid and knows full well why he asked her to look after his loft like this. She knows his intentions, knew from the beginning, and yet she went into it anyway, a woman almost thirty staying with a young man barely twenty who spends his time playing the piano, buying elaborate pieces of black clothing, and being driven to and from various cities in the back of a car with tinted windows and leather seats. She despises his lifestyle and at the same time knows it isn't his lifestyle at all - but a consequence of being too famous for his own good. She knows he would rather be here. He would rather be home.
Home. With her.
The sound of a piano jolts her back to the doorway and she is through the doorway before she knows what she will even say. He is back two days early. Her heels clunk into the floor behind her and she drops her briefcase, absently, into a chair by the living room entrance. Her coat is half-off when she sees him, seated at the piano, and she has to fight back a yell when she notices he is still wearing his overcoat and shoes. But he is playing something that even she has to admit she cares for (she hates the piano unless he plays it, and even then she usually feels indifferent about his supposedly miraculous ability), and the urge to nag him or ask questions dies as she feels that familiar uncertainty, watching him; feels both alone and together with him at this distance -
He notices her, then, as her coat drops completely from her shoulders to the floor. He lifts his hands, using one finger to adjust the glasses that have slid to the edge of his nose (they are new frames, she notes), and for an instant she swears that the ivory mask of his face bears a smile. She wonders what to say, how she will even begin to speak, how she can even start to tell him that these two weeks have been so empty, what she should say -
"Okaerinasai, Kirie."
- and he says it for her, so simply that she wonders suddenly how she could have ever been unsure of anything.
Their lines are out of order now but she says it to him anyway, walking to the piano, and for the first time in two weeks she thinks that it isn't hard to call this big, empty loft home after all.
"... tadaima."